The Engine and Empire of Gambling in New York City

David Black, a novelist, biographer and performance host, shared his years with Richardson’s senior Elaine, who gave him a chance to write his last drama, a fascinating plot of the episode Miami Vice, inspired by Fritz Lang’s “M”, which was announced not long ago in the mediocre French bistro. Although the central center of the park is still intact, traces of the Legend Writer’s restaurant have not survived, and today’s staff don’t seem to know what the place is. As is often seen in New York now, physical erases can experience generational amnesia.

Looking around cautiously, as if half of the people were expecting the Phantom – perhaps the novelists of the seventies still tied up their progress, like Marley’s ghost to his wallet – Brack recalls Richardson’s high, mean style: “He would raise his eyebrows, then raise his chin, and then raise his chin, that’s Jack, dance.” He laughed. Black and Richardson shared books and conversations in Elaine’s back room, and as Black’s cocaine acknowledged. He added: “His fate is ultimately tragic because he knows everything, speaks every language you can think of, and he is always talking about the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Rousseau and Didrot – he would say that they did the worst betel nut in the world. If there was God, I should have damn it, if there was no God, I was facing, I faced void. Transparent.

Richardson, in his memoir, attributes his gambling to gambling, glimpses the gap in the form of his proof of Gödel. As a philosophy student in Munich, Richardson was shocked by the demonstrations of Austrian logicians that even mathematics is “incomplete”, lacks a safe foundation, and contains unproven truths. On an unforgettable summer day, he wrote: “When I stared at the paradox, I never again vowed to formally think of anything important or worried that I had not won the right to anger and anger to a relatively pleasant one, and that the universe of this universe does not tolerate the predicate of sincerity.” In such a ridiculous universe, the dirty universe turned into sublime. If life is a meaningless dice roll, the only meaning is the roll itself – there is little comfort in comfort for those who are waiting at home for the grocery store.

Many have read Goldell and are punished for the determined restrictions – as Richardson did, the next step in logic is to spend cards on playing cards and pay for the prostitutes. (Richardson is a man of an era and doesn’t call them sex workers.) However, his memoirs (a book that fits well with the spirit of William Hazlitt or Thomas de Quincey, worthy of standing beside them, puts his decline into compulsion. Deprived of charm, his dissolution produces his own charm: pure addiction, charm that never says no. His career from New York to Las Vegas to Hong Kong to Macau, trying to win, trying not care about winning, making love to anonymous women.

In Macau, Richardson claimed to have encountered the devil, and according to Black, cocaine was full of influence on the incident, which Richardson did believe. In Richardson’s narrative, the devil says that he died like God, and that Baudelairean’s ancient pursuit seeks the ecstasy of sin through opportunity, is now doomed to be like the mystics’ ecstasy of God. “In short, excitement, joy, despair, mannias and mops – the high-level life of gambling may have been an element of the devil, but I promise you no longer a devil,” the devil explained. “I don’t want to take the measure of those whose souls will heat up hell, because I discovered a long time ago that whether I tripped up Caesar or a fool…you are so eager to believe you and even believe in my stuff.”

What should I do when the devil himself yawns at your private abyss, refusing to shrug tiredly to sell your soul? End the story in the book; in life, return to Elaine and play more poker. Richardson’s memoirs concluded: “If the soul does not find real action, it must be incited.” In that Coca-Cola era, he was a prominent performer, the long tail of Arnold Rothstein’s shady drug trafficking business, back to the gambling business he showed.

Black recalls that after he was dry, he eventually convinced Richardson to do the same. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Black reflects. “The body that relies on cocaine cannot survive its absence for a long time.” Richardson suffered a heart attack shortly after waking up, then frustrated, and another taxi from the hospital appeared and left in 2012. He doesn’t even bother him anymore, but “The Prodigal Son” deserves a revival and his book deserves a re-read.

Richardson’s game was perhaps one of the last games in which the city retained traces of fine lines. By the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of private curses had become a public wonder. The once obscure poker variant – Texas held em-surges, in part because poker players (and Holocaust survivors) Henry Orenstein invented the “hole” camera, which allowed TV viewers to see players’ hidden cards. Entering this new scene waving Molly Bloom, who ends up holding a high-stakes race in Manhattan and later tells an episode in her memoir, “Molly’s Game” and the Aaron Sorkin film based on it.

Bloom arrived in the city in 2009 and fled the aftermath of a poker game at a celebrity booth in Los Angeles, first managing a suspicious boss, then controlling a suspicious boss, and finally losing it. Growing up in Colorado and having an intoxicating background in Olympic skiing, she found New York’s poker world to be the “billionaire boys club” type, the field of Wall Street Titans and old-fashioned gamblers, where buying alone can hit a million dollars.

Rothstein and St. Clair once took over a series of suites in the square, wrapping gambling in a halo of charm. She formed a group of young women and created a carefully planned fantasy in which the financial man played cards in a rented hotel room to imagine himself as a Maverick.

“That’s the plan,” Bloom said with a smile recently at her home in Colorado. She is still surprising that she has become a thoughtful analyst in gambling psychology. “That’s the pre-match speech: Please don’t sleep with these guys. It’s a great job until you get involved – and then everything crashes. The more you can raise bets in the room without making it junk or truly illegal, the more you will be in another world. “She was keenly aware of the dream she thought of: “Sometimes, men would think they have feelings for me, and I had to tell them that this is not real life! Here, I am an anti-wife. In a real relationship, I will let you take out the trash. Here, I’m a saying, you no way The garbage must be removed. ”

Within months, Bloom and her team were running a big race in Manhattan. At first, she shrewdly played the innocent Impresario, relying solely on the players’ tips, which is legal compensation. The temptation arrives in the form of a “rake”, and this tiny cut gradually turns her character from a mistress to a violator. New York’s game law, like its morality, allows for some bad habits of enjoying pleasure, but requires profit. “In the end, I gambled like them,” Bloom admits. “I’m gambling my own abilities, better than criminals, competition, federal regulations and debt lists. I think I have an advantage – human psychology.”